Luraghi Silvia. On the Meaning of Prepositions and Cases-The Expression of Semantic Roles in Ancient Greek

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Publication date: 2003
Number of pages: 379The meaning of Greek prepositions has been one of my favorite topics of research for over twenty years. I became interested in prepositions when I was a student, and have regarded them as a very stimulating field for linguistic research ever since. This is of course true of prepositions in any language: however, my love for the Ancient Greek authors and their language has made Greek prepositions one of the most fascinating topics I could possibly investigate. I have always had the feeling that Ancient Greek, well studied and well described as it may be, deserved to be better known outside the circle of classicists. With this book, I hope to reach scholars who do not know Ancient Greek, and cannot use the majority of reference works, which generally require a great deal of previous knowledge. I hope that they will find the topic of this book as intriguing as I do. I would like to thank a number of people and institutions for their help during the preparation of this book. My colleagues at the Department of Linguistics of the University of Pavia have provided me with discussion on some specific points in the theoretical sections. Martin Haspelmath, John Hewson, Silvia Pieroni, and Stavros Skopeteas have read parts of the book, and have given me some insightful suggestions. Part of the research has been supported by a grant of the Italian Ministry of Education (MIUR, prot. 9910428971), in the framework of a national research project on Typological change in the morphosyntax of the Indo-European languages. A stay at the Freie Universität Berlin in the summer of 2000 was funded by an Alexander von Humboldt grant. I also wish to thank all the people who have helped me with practical aspects in the preparation of the final manuscript, in particular Franco Bianco, who has formatted the examples, and Lorena Rossi for correcting my English.